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Hitachi Demos Water-Cooled Notebooks
Sprocket writes: "Water-cooled processors, currently the domain of supercomputers, high-end servers, and garage hobbyists, may be about to enter the mainstream.
Hitachi has developed a prototype notebook PC that uses a water-based solution to cool down its Pentium 4 processor and is planning to commercialize the product for corporate users in the third quarter of this year... read more"
Water-cooled? That's boring.
Now what I want is an Ice-Cream-Cooled Laptop. Like an electronic Klondike bar. Mmmm...
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Kind of like Honda shipping riced up Civics by default, it's pretty funny that the industry is following the overclockers. To take a look at the roots of water cooling, check out the definitive hobbyist on the subject, complete with alternate designs, plans, technical faq - the works.
Personally, I'll buy it when it's packaged and done for me, and not until then.
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According to the specs, the unit will produce 0.3 oz of 140 degree-F. water per minute. Therefore, it should only take 15 minutes to brew one Standard 5 Oz. Cup of coffee. Now, if they can only get the CD-ROM drive to double as a cupholder....
You can already buy water cooling kits for your PC. (This company is accepting backorders.)
What and make my processor overheat? No way!
Water has a much higher calorific capacity than air. I believe it's around 4.19J/g*Celsius which is very high.
It is the logical choice for cooling, being less noisy, parts have to move slower, etc etc... But why does the article say this is for garage hobbyists? Water cooling has been around for a while and at least 5 relatively large cies offer it. Tomshardware and Anandtech have had quite a few reviews of the different brands.
Another plus is you can plug everything on the same circuit, Northbridge, CPU, GPU, hell, even the power supply. All you have to do is increase the pipe size by a relatively small factor.
The temperature is maintained around ambient too, so the cooling is MUCH more efficient than air.
The next step is nanocooling. There was an article in Nature a way back about nanofans (more like oscillating piezoelectric thingys), that dissipate heat at an astounding rate (although I don't recall how exactly since they throw it at the air which doesn't have such a good calorific capacity...). Anyways, the point is that this isn't really revolutionary because it has been used in home computers (by more than garage hobbyists) for at least 3 years. And before that there was Kryotech...
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"Man it sure was alot less lonely when we had those fans going."
Record your current fan noise, so you can play it back on the internal speaker of your future computer if it's too quiet.
No, really, I didn't wet my pants!! My laptop leaked!
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Water cooled laptops are nothing new at all. Check out these water cooling laptop articles, produced from a quick google search:
Toshiba
IBM
I know there are others, but I can't seem to find them at the moment. It's certainly my underestanding that there have been water cooled laptops in production for quite a while.
Isn't this really just more evidence that a P4 is inappropriate for laptops? Intel is making a good attempt at targeting a specific market (P4 is "primarily" a server chip), but their insistence on cramming every processor into a small box just for shits and giggles is silly.
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Wow. Talk about Vaporware...yikes...
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honestly, isnt a P4 in a notebook a complete and total waste? The main performance bottleneck in a notebook anymore is the harddrive, not the CPU. The whole idea of a laptop is to be able take it to various places and be able to run it for a few hours on the battery. With the kind of power the P4 sucks down, you can kiss that goodbye. Add in fans to cool down the processor and/or water, and more of your battery goes bye bye. You'd need DDR to get the most out of the P4 as well, sdram + P4 is horribly slow and Rambus generates huge amounts of heat, which we all know is a no no in a notebook. I'm sorry Intel, but not everyone wants or needs a Marketing Processor (which is what the P4 really is, marketing over engineering) in a notebook. Give me a cool running low power Mobile P3 any day of the week.
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Walking off a long flight.
No, honestly, my laptop just leaked...
Not sure about Pizza on P4, but try an egg on AthlonXP :-)
Watercooling requires a way to move that water, ie, a pump. Moving parts that require power, and the problem is that you still have to get x watts of heat out of the water at the other end. I think the current use of a heat pipe is much better than watercooling. The only "movement" is the phase change powered by the heat itself, and so there is less chance of failure.
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With current tech, we could create a 486 based word processing machine, thinner, cheaper, lighter, and with a week's worth of power, rather than just a few hours.
Why they insist on forcing desktop replacements on the market is beyond me. (Actually, it isn't beyond me, it's all about keeping those profit margins high.)
As a writer, dealing with these noisy, overheating, overpriced, heavy machines is distasteful. As a programmer, I'm gonna use my laptop as a terminal, not a server, so all those extra CPU cycles are wasted.
By the way, the revolutionary part about this laptop is that it uses a mechanical pump to move the hot coolant to the radiation panel at the back of the LCD, whereas traditional cooling mechanisms uses the palmrest and/or the bottom of the laptop to dissipate heat in addition to the air fan. The idea is that
Also, before people start screaming about how big the water tanks are in the photos, the article says that the tanks were deliberately enlarged to emphasize the point of these prototypes, and they will be reduced in production models.
Have you considered a 14" 600MHz 6lb iBook for your needs?
Word, Office, bash, sips at the battery, and comes with a fairly hefty 55W battery too. It runs, what, at a rated 6hours on a single battery? I suspect it runs lower, of course, but still, 4.5 hours isn't horrible.
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Heat pipes are an old idea - they were used in the Apollo program. IBM's key addition to the technology is developing a hinge that efficiently transfers heat between the laptop's body (the heat source) and the display (the heat radiator). There isn't much info in the article referenced in the original post to figure out just what Hitachi thinks is original.
Two obvious ones:
1) And you thought MEMORY leaks killed programs...
and
2) Going into that super important customer meeting after the water coolant just let go leaving a huge wet spot on the front of your pants: "No, really, it was my laptop!"
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